Microgreens

I’ve spent the last several days going through my old seeds and deciding what to use and what to toss. I generally have no trouble germinating seeds that are three or four years old. I don’t even store them under particularly ‘seed-friendly’ conditions, and yet many of them still produce.

Now, that’s fine, of course, if I’m starting transplants. I can plan for a certain quantity, and if they don’t all sprout, I can adjust my garden plan accordingly; there’s plenty of time to do so before they are set in the ground. But when it comes to sowing directly in the garden, there’s nothing more vexing, or more inefficient, than allocating precious garden space, providing TLC, and being rewarded with patchy germination.

So, here’s the general plan:

First, I’m scaling back on tomatoes. I’m not buying new seeds. I’m going to use up everything I’ve got and grow enough for fresh consumption, for drying, and perhaps for freezing (which I’ve never done before), but I’m going to avoid canning, if at all possible. I enjoy the process, but I have to sacrifice a lot of family time to accommodate it, which I am no longer willing to do. (And besides, my diet is evolving away from cooked and even home-processed foods.)

Second, I’ve discovered, all on my own (pat pat), that the best way to use up old seeds – instead of tossing them – is to scatter them all in a flat and grow them as microgreens. Then I don’t have to worry about their germination rates and I can go ahead and order the twenty (or so) new varieties I’ve had my eye on (tee hee).

The old seeds are a mix of red and green cabbage, beets, chard, mizuna and radishes. The new seeds will be cornsalad, chinese cabbage, tatsoi, mibuna, sylvetta, red and green kale, new varieties of beet, cabbage and radish, and always loads and loads of wacky lettuces and spinach. Almost half of my latest garden plan is dedicated to greens (thanks to the tomato reduction). That’s a lot of square footage in a 30 x 40′ garden.

Whatever seeds are leftover at the end of the season, will be next winter’s microgreens.

Finally, I’m late starting my onions and leeks. I always start them mid-February, watch them gleefully for the first couple of months, and then slowly shift my attention to other more important crops, like tomatoes and peppers. By the time the broccoli, cabbage, marigolds, melons, tomatoes, peppers and various herbs are all vying for precious sunlight, the onions and leeks should be going in the ground, but instead, are often left to dry out on a shelf somewhere; they rarely ever make it to the garden.

So this year will be different. I’m planting them, as before, and caring for them diligently, as before, but when the competition starts to get out of control, I’m going to cut them and use them as microgreens too. This should carry me through to spring when the first of the chives start to appear.

Will I still plant onion sets? Possibly. But they do require a decent amount of space. Why bother when chives thrive throughout? Hmmm.